Serious leisure and the DIY approach to heritage: considering the costs of career volunteering in community archives and museums

ABSTRACT

This article takes a serious leisure perspective to examine the costs associated with career volunteering in DIY heritage institutions focused on the collection, preservation and curation of popular music’s past. While the rewards of serious leisure have been analysed extensively in the literature, costs are addressed less frequently. Moreover, Stebbins’ framing of costs has been critiqued as ambiguous and underdeveloped. In this article, we draw on Stebbins’ tripartite model of tensions, dislikes and disappointments to analyse costs that emerged from ethnographic interviews undertaken with volunteers in 13 DIY popular music heritage institutions. Types of costs included tensions that were interpersonal, relational, financial, temporal (work, family, leisure), and related to well-being (emotional, physical); dislikes centred on shortages of dependable volunteers, volunteers who demonstrate a ‘lack of care’, and ineffective leadership; and disappointments focused on being let down by others, unsuccessful funding applications, and organisational change. Although rewards outweigh costs, we find that recognising the costs involved for career volunteers in DIY heritage institutions is crucial for contextualising rewards and perseverance, as well as for understanding how different types of costs overlap and exacerbate one another.

KEYWORDS:

• Career volunteering
• popular music heritage
• DIY institutions
• serious leisure perspective
• costs

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council under grants DP1092910 and DP130100317.

Notes on contributors

Zelmarie Cantillon

Zelmarie Cantillon is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research. She is author of Resort Spatiality: Reimagining Sites of Mass Tourism (2019) and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Popular Music History and Heritage (2018) and Remembering Popular Music’s Past: Memory–Heritage–History (2019). Email: [email protected]. Twitter: @zelzelzel

Sarah Baker

Sarah Baker is Professor of Cultural Sociology in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science at Griffith University. She is the author of Community Custodians of Popular Music’s Past: A DIY Approach to Heritage (2017) and Curating Pop: Exhibiting Popular Music in the Museum (2019, with Lauren Istvandity and Raphaël Nowak). Email: [email protected]. Twitter: @__sarahbaker__